I am somewhat new to the community manager role, having just launched a new Jive 5.0 community to our global organization of 4,500 last week. I am interested to know other community managers' level of involvement in addressing users' technical issues, to include opening cases with Jive, recreating the problem, documenting, escalating, etc. I have never done this type of thing and I wonder who owns this in other organizations - the community manager, IT, someone else?

When our Jive site was first launched, there was a lone Community Manager who did everything you've mentioned above. At about the year and a half mark, he managed to hire me to handle the more technical side of things (working with users, managing most of the Jive cases, recreating problems, etc.). I think it really all depends on the size of your community, the speed with which your community becomes engaged, and the expectations/goals that have been set for you in your role. Both sides of the equation are important, but there is also only so much a single individual can do.

And you'll find that who owns what varies DRAMATICALLY from organization to organization. Much of it depends on whether you are internally or externally hosted, and what sorts of involvement different departments had in the initial roll-out.

Agree with the others. Our experience has evolved, but after 3 years, we now have 3 separate roles doing this...a CM who cares for the entire community, consultants who work with business units on their soc biz strategy and usage of the platform, and support analysts who field issues and log bugs to Jive.

The key is what type of support you have and the expectations on what you can/will do. If you have the skill set or can leverage IT or web development resources, you can move away from Out-of-the-box basic look and feel and have someone else report and monitor tickets with Jive.

While I started running the internal community, most of the time, it was just me. As the usage and value increased, we were able to add some support from other groups.

From my past experiencing launching this type of platform, unless you are very technical, you'll really benefit from having some IT support as part of your team. I have a full time IT project manager and we generally spit support by directing user questions to me ("How do I...") and tech questions to her ("It doesn't work"). She also has 95% of the direct contact with Jive support as they generally need someone with advanced knowledge of our internal systems. Sometimes I try to determine if someone's tech issue is really user error before passing it on to IT. We go live in about six weeks, so I am trying to supplment my generic user support with volunteer advocates from our pilot program groups.

My experience is essentially the same as Tracy Maurer and Mike Crocker. I had some part-time support from my supervisor, who comes from the tech side, but otherwise was mostly handing the community on my own. Now that we have grown a bit, we have a small group of developers and QA people. If you can get one or two of those folks on your team, I highly recommend it. Problems are identified and resolved much more quickly when people with good technical skills are doing the testing and communicating with Jive Support.

Hi Paris:I think I met you once before. : ). I hope you're doing well and your 5.0 launch was successful.

Based on what I've seen in this Internal Community Managers Group, it really seems like the CM role is very different at every company -- and you just need to find what works for your company. My gut is that if you come from a technical background, you can easily (or at least more quickly) perform a lot of the tasks you mention, like addressing users' technical issues, documenting, etc. At my organization, I have one IT counterpart who does most everything you mention and it works out well.

We too are on Jive 5.0. At my organization (2,300 employees), I am the Enterprise Community Manager and am responsible mainly for managing and monitoring the community, including the design, structure, content, governance and guidelines, growing adoption throughout the organization and measuring success. On a daily basis, I answer a lot of questions online, present to a lot of groups and do a lot of training (one-on-one, instructor-led, etc.).

Our technical person supports me and deals more with the IT side of things, like trying to get single sign-on (which we don't have), managing and assigning permissions, trouble-shooting user technical issues and requests, and answering questions and "How do I's" that I cannot answer or re-create myself. We share the responsibility for opening tickets with Jive and escalating issues, depending on whether they are "business" or "technical" in nature.

This allocation works for us, although we both certainly delve into each others' respective areas at times.